


Buzzkill

by scioscribe



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Extra Treat, F/F, Flirting, Post-Movie: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Pre-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-21
Updated: 2018-07-21
Packaged: 2019-06-11 16:55:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15319986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: “I’m not good at parties,” Gamora said.





	Buzzkill

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Snickfic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/gifts).



The half-Celestial had the Grandmaster all in a tizzy.  You’d have thought somebody had dropped a free kitten in his lap.  These “Guardians of the Galaxy” were going to get their refueling done on the house just because the boss was so excited to meet somebody who could punch at his own weight—well, somebody who could have if he hadn’t gotten declawed.  Best of both worlds, really, the Grandmaster said.  You find someone who’s simpatico but not a threat and you ride that pony to the finish line.

“If they didn’t have so many Xandarian ties,” he said musingly, “I could just detain them a little longer… I mean, they’re perfect hothouse flowers, really.  But, oof, it’s Xandar _and_ it’s Thanos.  The last thing I want is that kind of headache.”

“So let them go when they want to go?”

It was nothing to her.  All she wanted to know was whether or not there’d be anything in it for her if she caught them running.  Apparently not.

“But if you’re having a little trouble making ends meet, there, Scrapper 142, I’ll tell you what would make me very happy and very generous—take Little Miss Buzzkill off somewhere and keep her entertained for a while.  She’s got this glower on her and it’s bringing down everybody’s mood.”

She knew who he meant, yeah.  The Zehobberei woman was hard to overlook.  It wasn’t just the green skin and the red-violet hair and sleek fighting leathers, it was the killer’s gaze in the hero-soft eyes.  She didn’t gel with herself.  She looked like a Valkyrie, and the time for Valkyries was over.  Val knew that better than anyone.

So she shrugged.  “Sure.  I’ll take her off your hands for a bit.”

He lavished praise on her.  And she would say this about the Grandmaster: he lavished credits on you too, he didn’t expect anybody to live on gratitude alone.  So this would be an easy payday.

She found Little Miss Buzzkill in the main hall, drinking a cup of cerulean punch and glaring daggers at everyone around her.  Her friends were all right—the half-Celestial Ravager boy was encircled by admirers who wanted to touch the coat-hem of the Grandmaster’s new best friend, the rabbit and the tree were blowing things up in the courtyard, the big guy had made his way to the Contest of Champions to probably lose all his money betting on longshots.  It was only Buzzkill who couldn’t find anything better to do than hang around like sour-faced a wallflower.

Val tapped her on the shoulder.  She saw the warrior’s twitch, the immediate assumption that the touch was a precursor to violence, but then Buzzkill’s muscles relaxed.

“Yes?” she said sharply.

“What’s your name?”

She pursed her lips.  She must have been about to refuse to say—so not just a warrior, then.  Nothing so straightforward as that.  Not much of a cardplayer, either, if she had this many tells.  “Gamora.”

Gamora was too wide-awake and too wary for Val to give her own name back.  She did say it sometimes, because it was perversely good now and then to rub salt in her own wounds and remember that nobody on Sakaar gave a damn about Asgard, but not now.  _Brunnhilde_ , she came close to saying, but that name was dusty.  She’d given it up when she’d gotten her sword.  A Valkyrie was a Valkyrie was a Valkyrie to anybody but her sisters-in-arms.

“Val,” she said.  “Or you can call me 142, if you’d rather.”

“I wouldn’t.”  She took another sip of her drink.  “Why are you here?”

“I can’t want to talk to you?”  That was painful even to her own ears—fuck, she was out of practice at this.  She bedded her share of beauties, but usually in drunken tumbles that required less conversation and not even that much coordination.  “More accurately, I’m getting paid to.  The Grandmaster says you’re dampening the mood.”

“Your Grandmaster is a madman drunk on decadence.”

“Doesn’t change the fact that he’s right.”

“I’m having a perfectly fine time.”

“I don’t think it’s your good time he’s concerned about.”

Gamora looked at her.  “I’m not going to dance with you if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I don’t dance.”

“Good,” Gamora said.

Val couldn’t say this was the most sparkling conversation she’d ever had.  “Come off with me.”

“Why?”  Gamora’s cool gaze raked her up and down and Val, to her surprise, felt herself respond to it: it had been a long time since she’d wanted anyone, a long time since she’d had time to feel desire before some girl’s spit-slick fingers were moving between her legs, stirring her up.  But Gamora wasn’t looking at her tits or her hips, she was looking at the tools of Val’s trade.  “So you can stick a buzzer on my neck and toss me in the sandpit?”

“No, I wouldn’t waste you on that lot, I’d want to fight you myself.”

“You’d lose.”

Val shook her head.  “I really wouldn’t.”

This time Gamora’s sizing up of her felt a little different, and when she too shook her head, tossing that long, unbound hair of hers around, that felt different, too, not straight negation but something a little more complicated.  Val didn’t really do complicated as a general rule, but it was different if you got paid for it.  It was different if complicated looked like Gamora.

“I’m not good at parties,” Gamora said.  She exhaled.  “Peter says make small talk, but I don’t even know what that means.  I mean, I know what it means, but I don’t know how to do it.”  She turned on Val fiercely.  “What do you want to hear about?  Thanos?  Ronan?”

“I don’t know who either of those people are,” Val said.  “So not especially.”  Well, she had the hazy knowledge, informed by the Grandmaster giving a shit at all, that Thanos was powerful, but that was all.  She took Gamora’s drink out of her hand and took a gulp from it before handing it back to her.  “What’s a Guardian of the Galaxy?  Is that, like, self-proclaimed, or did somebody say you were, or is it a club and you all have special jackets, or…”

“Somebody said we were,” Gamora said, straight-faced, though Val hadn’t seen her have any other kind of face anyway, “and then we killed him.”

“Ditched him, kept the name.”

“Yes.”  She drank very deliberately from the glass, and if that was meant as a challenge, she’d better know what she was asking for.  Apparently she did, because she drained the glass and then slammed it down in her palm.  “My father used to have us have drinking contests.  We all had to be nearly invulnerable to poison, and he said alcohol was poison.  Whoever passed out first lost a part of their body.  I was very, very good at it.  I only lost once.”

Saying she was sorry felt like it would be an insult.  “What did you lose?”

“My left ear.  But the replacement is very good.  He always… always made my modifications look as close to my real body as possible.  He didn’t do that for everyone.”  She pulled her hair back and let Val see her ear.  The scar that ran around it was fingernail thin and silvery against Gamora’s skin.  Now that Val was looking closely, now that her breath was stirring Gamora’s hair, she could see the unnatural smoothness of the lobe, the perfect poreless shell.  But Gamora was right.  It was close.  She would never have known if Gamora hadn’t told her, which begged the question of why Gamora had.

She leaned back.  Out of some uncomfortable desire for parity— _you show me yours, I’ll show you mine_ —she pulled her own hair back and let Gamora see the thick scar that ran from her neck down to her collarbone.

“Someone wanted your head off,” Gamora said.

“Not really.  He just wanted me to know he could have it if he chose.”

“Why?”

“Dereliction of duty.  I was supposed to be somewhere, but I’d left all my friends dead on the battlefield.  I didn’t see the point of being anywhere but in the ground.  He wanted a shining, glorious new world and I didn’t fit in.  You could say this was my last chance—either straighten up and be the good girl, get my face in all the new portraits, or die with my name soiled, a coward and a deserter.”  But she hadn’t wanted to die at Odin’s hands, hadn’t wanted to be the object of one of Odin’s stern but loving corrections.  She was no girl at all anymore, let alone a good one.  She ran again, and that time she didn’t stop at the nearest tavern.  That time she’d run all the way to Sakaar.  Let Odin chase her down _here_ , she had thought when she’d first landed.  He’d be dead of disgust within half a minute.

“I deserted too,” Gamora said.

“Sounds like you had a cause worth deserting.”

“It doesn’t sound like yours was too good either.”

“The cause was a waste of time and blood.  The people were—”  She swallowed.  She hadn’t wanted to get into any of this.  “The people were something else.”

Gamora squeaked her finger against the condensation on her glass.  “All I was saying, anyway,” she said evenly, “was that if I couldn’t outfight you, you couldn’t outdrink me either.  You should accept it as a tie.  And if I leave here, I want half of whatever he’s paying you to get me out of the room.”

Val smiled.  “Then you should have asked first how much I was getting.”

“I’m persuasive,” Gamora said.  “I could make you tell me,” and Val was eighty percent sure now that this was Gamora, bad-at-parties, bad-at-small-talk Gamora, trying to flirt, except the way she said it sounded way more like she was thinking of pinning Val to the nearest wall and eking the truth out of her piece by piece.  Though come to think of it, that sounded all right.

Of course, they hadn’t agreed on a specific sum, so the interrogation could take a while.

That sounded all right too.

She could feel a real buzz going in her limbs now, loosening her up, better than any drink.  She’d forgotten how much she liked this, the way the distance between their two bodies became a battlefield, the way you knew, leaning in, that you were taking a risk; the way you knew, leaning out, that you were a coward.  Spoiling not for a fight but for a collision, no matter how much it was going to hurt.

“All right,” Val said.  “Convince me.”


End file.
